I Saw Him Across the Restaurant. It Was Only a Dream.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop as it thunders outside and Eric Clapton’s song, Wonderful Tonight, is playing overhead. There are two Korean women to my left on a top-top table having a deep conversation. Two students behind me are chatting with ChatGPT, and a blank cream wall faces me. My computer sits on an uneven surface, where it moves every other keystroke.

It’s beautifully imperfect, and I could choose to move to another table or stay. I’ve chosen to stay for the time being, and that’s where we are today.

Choices. Decisions. Repercussions. Outcomes. Ownership.

Tofully take responsibility for our life is to accept all the sh*t we have always had control of. Most of us have had the illusion of control until something cracks, which was a delusion we choose to sit in.

Ouch.

I’ll say it out loud in words on a very public internet: I’ve always been an avoidant, running from my emotions and life. My life has looked very put together at times on the surface, but underneath it all, I was as shattered as the next person.

My reason for life was that I felt the pain of the next person as much as the pain I ran from. I wanted to save them and to help them as much as I wished someone had done the same for me.

Resentment boils when you try to please others for validation. Anger steams when you emotionally manipulate someone. A version of control because all you knew were responses when you emotionally reacted.

Choices. Decisions….

I’ve never dreamed about him, but he came into my dreams recently. That’s when I knew I had the capacity within me to safely begin processing the emotions I’ve run from.

— — –

I sat in the busy restaurant when I saw you three tables in front of me. I rubbed my eyes and shook my head to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. It was you, right? I wondered. Nah, that’s him, I thought to myself. You dissipated into thin air as I went to the hostess of the restaurant to confirm it was you.

The hostess asked me if I needed anything, and I pretended to move through small talk before bringing you up. “Yes, that’s him. He’s here,” she responded as I described you. “Let me bring you to him,” she said as we moved towards the elevator.

It brought us to the second floor of the building. You sat at the far end across the elevator door with a woman behind you and another woman next to her. Anger raged within me as I saw you sitting in my city. It filled my whole being as I raced towards you to demand an answer to, “What are you doing in my city?”

Even in my dreams, I could feel the anger lucidly in my conscious mind. What brought me over the edge was that the woman next to you answered. The dam broke as heated words flowed from me, “You can’t even answer my question? She’s answering for you???”

Have you ever been in a rage that everything life ever taught you was thrown out the window, and suddenly you were a caged animal unleashed? Yeah, that.

The rage floated my body towards the elevator, and before I could push the button, I caught myself as I turned around to look at you. Wait, why am I so angry at you? What did you do to me? Awareness rushed through my body to move the anger out to see you through a new perspective. “Oh my God”, I said to myself.

It was never about you, it was always about me…

I can rewrite this dream, I thought. I could rewrite it now as I took a deep breath and began walking back towards you. I smiled as my energy regulated and sat down next to you again. But this time, there was no anger.

Another deep breath, “Hey, how are you? What are you doing here?” I asked you.

— —

I woke up then, five minutes before my 5:30 AM alarm.

Even in my dreams, I made a choice to rewrite my story.

Here’s what actually happened in that turn towards the elevator. I asked myself a question instead of staying inside the story I’d already written about you. What did you do to me? Not what I imagined you did. Not what I’d rehearsed for years. What did you actually do, right now, in this room?

The anger had nowhere left to live after that.

That’s the part nobody tells you about rage: it needs a story to survive on. The second I stopped feeding it the old one, it just… stopped. Not because I forgave you. Not because I became enlightened in my sleep. Because I finally asked a question I’d been avoiding while wide awake.

Choices. Decisions…

I didn’t need the dream to play out the way it always had. I caught myself dysregulated and chose, mid-spiral, to regulate. That’s the whole lesson. Not that I don’t get triggered anymore, not that the dreams stop coming. It’s that I’m no longer required to finish the story the old way just because that’s how it always started.

You can’t control what shows up. The memory, the table at the restaurant, the rage that floats your body toward an elevator before your brain catches up.

But you can control whether you keep walking, to avoid it completely, or whether you turn around.

I turned around.

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